Lin M, Kylee C, and Jordan C! Congratulations! You have each won an autographed copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rise of the Turtles!

Thank you to everyone who submitted. It was obvious after the first few days that Donatello was the most popular turtle with our readers. It’s a dead give-away in my opinion because this is GeekMom and Donatello is the head geek of the group. I guess if this was PartyMom or LeadershipMom, we might have seen a different outcome on the favorite.

To show you how everyone ranked, check out this handy little chart I made:

I have to say, after talking with Gregory Cipes, I was really rooting for Mikey to beat out at least Raphael. I was very surprised by the lack of love for Leonardo though. I guess being the leader isn’t always the most likable position. Some of the other character favorites were Splinter, April, Shadow Jones, Shredder, and Casey Jones.

Emily Davison’s Grave. Davison was a suffragette who died trampled by the King’s horse while trying to publicize the movement at a derby in 1913.

I recently watched the The Big Bang Theory episode in which Sheldon Cooper meets his idol, Stephen Hawking. That’s in season 5 episode 21 which aired on April 5th, 2012, proving yet again that I’m always a year behind on the pop culture scene but that’s parenting for you. Anyway, the episode sparked an interesting conversation between my husband and I about who we’d most want to meet if we could meet anyone: live, dead, or fictional. I knew my fellow GeekMoms would surely have some very interesting choices, and as usual, they didn’t fail to entertain brilliant choices!

Live

Stephen Fry

Jules: Stephen Fry, because he is a fascinating person, highly intelligent and has some interesting life experiences, including his battle with mental illness.

Andrew Wiles

Ariane: Andrew Wiles, who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. I remember studying the theorem in a Number Theory class and I got really excited to learn that the world’s most difficult math problem had been solved in my lifetime. From that moment on, it’s been my dream that I would one day be able to shake Wiles’ hand! Can you imagine being able to say “I met the guy who solved Fermat’s last theorem”?! So cool!

Dakster: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche – He’s an inspiration to me when it comes to overcoming anxiety and panic attacks. I would love to sit with him and discuss what I’ve been doing and listen to the advice I know he could give me.

Felicia Day

Sophie: I imagine most people could never live up to the projection of them in my mind but I’d probably pick Felicia Day. We share the same sense of humour and interests, I’d love to do a Flog segment with her one day. Well, either her or Nathan Fillion – just for his sense of humour you understand? Right?

Joss Whedon

Mandy: I’d love to meet Joss Whedon because I love his work and I’d love to have a conversation with him. And while I have met Wil Wheaton at Dragon*Con, I’d love to play in a D&D game with him but I think that is highly improbable.

In this week’s episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Nickelodeon, we see what happens when geeks get bored.

Donatello (voiced by Rob Paulsen from Planet Sheen), being bored with using his bo staff to fight, decides to use his tech skills to develop a TMNT….Teenage Metal Ninja Turtle, appropriately named Metalhead. Now, instead of using his entire body to fight the likes of Kraang and his enemies Donnie just sends in Metalhead and uses a handy little remote to control him and his ninja skills.

In the clip we can see that Raphael and Leonardo have a problem with using Metalhead to fight their battles. Much to their surprise though, the metal turtle is more than capable of handling itself in a fight.

It’s safe to say that something goes wrong (or the episode would be really short) and instead of being a helping hand, Metalhead turns sides and Donatello learns that while he might get bored with his bo staff, it’s better than a metal robot that can turn on you faster than Michelangelo can scarf down a pizza.

The best thing I saw at the Time to Play Holiday Showcase 2012? Mega Bloks Skylanders building sets. Look at little Kaos! And there’s a sheep catapult! Photo: Amy Kraft

Is it too soon to start thinking about the toys you should be tracking down for your GeekKids this holiday season? Time to Play Magazine doesn’t think so. Every year around this time they host the Time To Play Holiday Showcase to show off what they will believe will be the hottest toys of the season based on their kid testing and reviews. Among these were ten that are sure to appeal to your geeklets.

Readers of this blog know how excited we are for Skylanders Giants. In addition to the game itself, Mega Bloks is coming out with Skylanders building sets. I really wanted to grab this off the display and run home with it. Kids will love the details from the video game as they bring their Skylands fun offline.

Innovation First, the creative minds that gave us Hexbugs, have expanded their line to include cars. Oh, but these are no ordinary cars. These Tagamoto motorized vehicles use Hexbug technology to send cars around the track you build. But they don’t stop there. Stickers and signs that you place along the raceway cause the cars to follow traffic signs and turn on their headlights.

I am a big fan of the heroes in a half-shell and have happy memories of watching the first run of cartoons years ago. I know the theme song by heart and there is still a much-loved plastic cereal bowl in my kitchen cabinet that came attached to a box of cereal. I was in college and I bought it just so I could get that silly bowl and give it to my then-boyfriend who was a huge fan of the Ninja Turtles. It is one of the few objects that survived from college into our married life. Sadly, with Michael Bay’s recent statements about the remake, it seems that may be all that survives of the original franchise.

The Ninja Turtles are supposed to be mutants trained in the ways of crime-fighting by a wise mutant rat. They live in a sewer, eat pizza, know martial arts and talk like teenagers. As I type that I realize just how utterly goofy a premise that is, but they were still fun to watch. They’re kind of like all those cat videos. Sure, a cat playing piano is silly, but how can you not like a cat playing piano or a turtle wielding nunchucks? But the turtles have more of a story than Internet cats and you can only mess with an origin story so much before you break it into unrecognizable pieces.

Their origin story is simple. They became the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after taking a swim in the sewers of New York City and coming in contact with glowing radioactive goo. Until then, they were happy little turtles, munching lettuce and minding their own turtle business. But Michael Bay has announced that the coming live-action movie will feature the turtles as aliens.

They are not the Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles so how does that even work? I mean, what if you did the reverse and suddenly decided Superman wasn’t an alien but a guy who fell into a sewer and gained supernatural powers? Yeah, that would mess things up real good, just like it’s going to do with the turtles. You might as well make them zombies or cyborgs or some weird combination of it all if you’re going to mess with their origin story to such a degree.

All franchises goes through changes, but turning the turtles into aliens is just too much. Maybe change their love of pizza into a love of tacos or update their teenage lingo so they don’t sound like they’re twenty years out of date. But that’s it. I want my Ninja Turtles to be cute little turtles from Earth that have mutated due to toxic sewer goo. I do not want them to come from The Planet of the Turtles.

Most GeekMoms will acutely remember the moment in which we became moms. Be it the birth story of our first child, the moment we saw her during the adoption proceedings, or the day the lawyer met us at the door, small boy in hand, muttering something about an obscure cousin dying and a last will and guardianship. Those things are etched in our mind even as other things fade away.

But how many of us remember the moment we became geeks? What moment in time did you fall in love with something so deeply you knew it would be part of you forever? When did you realize that the things you loved were a little different and that loving them would make you different and, darn it all if you just didn’t care? I asked these questions of the GeekMom writers and was met with enthusiastic answers. Just as you’ll get the full run-down, gory details and all, if you ask a mom for her birth story, ask a geek how they became a geek and brace yourself for the onslaught.

While most of us admitted that in some fashion, whether we realized it or not, we were always geeks. Cathe Post beat us all by claiming she was actually a pre-natal geek. When her parents went to see Star Wars while Cathe was in utero, she kicked through all of John Williams music.

“Chaos” Mandy also started young as her dad read The Lord of the Rings to her as a preschooler. Later in life when she asked him if he censored it for his then-pre-schooler he replied, “No the violent parts are the best parts.”

Most of us were coaxed into our geekhood by the entertainment industry.

Natania Barron, our editor supreme (no, that is not brown-nosing…), found her geekhood in a shell, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shell. She truly geeked out, purchasing every comic, figurine, action figure, and bit of paraphernalia. She memorized the lines of the movies and even woke at dawn to watch the cartoon. It was her first all-encompassing obsession and while others would overshadow it, she never quite got over her first geek crush on Donatello.

Corrina Lawson spun into geekdom via spinner rack comics. A reprint of Captain America, the issue of Justice League of American where Elongated Man joined the team, and The Legion of Super-Heroes ushered her into a lifelong love of comics. Batman and The Spook only cost her a quarter then but were so worth so much more to her. (Of course their worth so much more now, too…)

Kristin Rutherford discovered Monty Python’s Flying Circus while visiting her aunt’s apartment. It was a pure moment of happenstance that created an MP fanatic. She became obssessed, memorizing the bits and gags. The Monty Python films followed shortly thereafter as did the books and records. Even now she eagerly awaits the chance to share her passion with her own daughter.

Sophie Brown first gave her geek heart to X-Files. She has photo evidence of her room plastered in posters of Mulder, Scully, and the infamous flukeworm. As if she needed more proof of total geekhood, she even brought home life size cut-outs of the agents.

Andrea Schwalm had Lost in Space. She recalls being frightened by Mr. Smith. Even as a young child she understood that there was something very wrong with him. She played Lost in Space using her Fisher-Price farm set. COWS IN SPACE. That single show began her “lifelong love affair with scifi, outer space, robots and sociopathic baddies.”

Others of us among the writing staff found our geek-out moments snuggly in the world of education.

This is where I land. As a student I was considered academically gifted thus allowed to partake of a secondary, advanced curriculum. In second grade I discovered that I was to be enrolled in a course on Ancient Egypt the following school year. I made my mom bring me to the library as often as possible. I devoured it all, including things from the grown-up non-fiction section, and by the start of third grade I could very nearly teach the class myself. One course introduced me to history. Twenty-some odd years later, I’m still doing my best to get acquainted.

Delphine Imbert served as a class representative at age nine. Her fellow representative was a boy and when another student verbalized concerns of his sharing the office with a girl, the boy replied “She’s not a girl! She’s a genius!” Delphine took that to heart and allowed that self-confidence to help shape her actions through her childhood.

Cindy Ortiz experienced her first geek-out moment in college…at age ten. Her tenth summer saw her enrolled computer classes. Though they spent quite a bit of their time doodling with paint, at the end of the class they were presented with a book containing their computerized art. Cindy recalls the summer as one of her best.

Yet others found a mentor that guided us, either on purpose or accidentally, into discovering (or accepting) our geekhood.

Amy Kraft was guided by her brother, five years her junior. She found early on that she much preferred his things to hers. She was only to happy to oblige when it turned out that he was just too young to do by himself things like build a Lego space station or rescue Princess Peach from the pixelated world of NES.

Patricia Volmer was guided by her dad, one of the smartest people she’s known, despite his never going to college. Each Christmas he gave her a unique and distinctly geeky gift like a microscope, a chemistry set, a model airplane kit and others. Together they set off rockets and restored cars and he inherently understood how much she would enjoy all those things.

Laura Grace Weldon was guided by a friend of her parents. She was about ten and had always been very concerned about world affairs. When she discovered that this friend was an engineer at a nuclear power plant she confronted him, asking if the power was worth the risk. He patronized her, lectured her, and she lost any hope of winning that argument. However, he also inspired her. She couldn’t have won that debate as she hadn’t been armed with the necessary knowledge. She quickly learned the power of research and the adult section of the library. To this day she still thirsts for that knowledge. In her own words, “Geeks can’t help themselves. There’s always more to find out.”

Of course we have all evolved. It is the nature of geeks to cling to our passions and many of have since our earliest days. Perhaps you can relate. Maybe you’ve connected with your favorite GeekMom blogger. Perhaps you find yourself reliving your own original geek-out. Please share. We’ve shared ours and can’t wait to hear yours!